IFirST KNeW Alan during my senior year in college. They were not happy times, my col- lege years. My home country Greece was under a dictator’s
boot, and at school I was stuck studying electrical engineering. Certain
topics—communication theory, control theory—I did find inspiring, not
so much because the issues they addressed appealed to me, but because
their treatment gave me a glimpse of
what I was longing for: a brave intellectual universe in which the most fundamental questions are confronted head
on and with rigor.

And then I came across the Turing
machine. It was a dry definition buried
in an article about pattern recognition, if I remember correctly, without
motivation or explanation. Based on
nothing, I knew immediately that this
formal object with the strange appeal
is an important exemplar of my ideal
universe. I became obsessed with the
Turing machine. I longed to learn
more about it, but I had no access to
a scientific library. I looked up in my
English-Greek dictionary the verb “to
ture” (I really did). In the end, I managed to piece together the puzzle, how
a man named Alan Turing crafted his
machine in order to answer the paramount question of his time: what can
be computed, and what cannot.

Two years later I was a graduate stu-dent at Princeton University (Turing’sPrinceton, by the way, where I livedfor two years in room 2B of the gradu-ate college, which, as legend had it,was Turing’s room in the 1930s). Ac-ademia was never in my plans: I hadapplied to graduate school mainly asa pretext for fleeing fascism. I startedclasses at Princeton’s electrical engi-neering department with an amusedcuriosity, while gazing at the land-scape around me, my mind open toall opportunity.